The update is causing problems. Your PIN and/or pattern will no longer get you into your phone. Hard reset with loss of data is only known fix so far. Watch some of the blogs or blu Facebook pages for updates.

I was wondering if it was just me and there was some other password that I used once and forgot. I contacted BLU support about the issue. I will update once I hear back. It looks like they encrypt the phones with a password from their end. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the wisdom to backup beforehand. I am now trying to figure out a way to keep my data.

I would see if you can still unlock your phone with the recovery boot. If so, you can access it all there. If not… Well best of luck to you.

And yes, the phone uses your password to encrypt their encryption password which they use to encrypt the data on your phone. If either your password or theirs gets changed, your data can’t be decrypted. Mind you, there are special flags which indicate what files will and won’t be encrypted. Magisk modifies these flags for some files, so an update could force a change back. The fun thing that you may wish to try is using no password when you access the files in recovery and see what happens.

if you already have TWRP installed then try flashing the stock ROM or Drax ROM over without wiping data partition. May revert things back, the trick is to figuring out how to install twrp if they hadn’t installed it before they got locked out.

I tried recovery boot, but it didn’t give me any useful options unless I want to wipe everything. Last night I tried to see if I could root it and install a custom ROM, but it looks like I never actually enabled unlock OEM and there really isn’t anything I can do without that. I am going to give it a few days to see if BLU support decides to respond (they still haven’t acknowledged my support tickets), and then I will likely have to wipe it all.

BLU support finally got back to me. The summary of their emails is as follows:

“<span style=”color: #1f497d; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”>Our Software Team is aware of this and is currently working on a fix for such inconvenience. </span><span style=”color: #1f497d; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”>At this point in time, we have 2 solutions in case you need immediate access to your device</span>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”><span style=”color: #1f497d;”><span style=”font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”> </span></span></p>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”><span style=”color: #1f497d;”><span style=”font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”>1. Exceed the amount of pin attempts on the device (please note that this will erase all the data, pictures and videos saved in the internal memory).<u></u><u></u></span></span></p>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”><span style=”color: #1f497d;”><span style=”font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”> In case this does not work proceed with the second step.<u></u><u></u></span></span></p>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”><span style=”color: #1f497d;”><span style=”font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;”>2. Perform a Hard Master Reset:”</span></span></p>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”></p>
<p class=”MsoNormal” style=”margin: 0px; color: #000000; font-family: arial;”>Basically, they have no solution. They broke it and they are working on it. As a developer and IT professional, I have no idea how they approved an update that broke everyone’s phone but this is where we are it seems.</p>

You know how we have the factory image recovery? I wonder if it’s possible to only reimage the kernel and/or the boot portion of the phone without performing a data wipe. It’s outside of my expertise, but it could be possible if someone else having this phone creates the partial image. OR see if you can pull the entire memory image with qfil before performing a reimage of it and then image it back if a fix is found or if you can image just the kernel portion again.

I can look for a fix to this myself this weekend I think. Let me backup before I brick it though.

Okay, so what I’m attempting to do is to make a single partition emmcdl file to QFIL back to the bricked phones. I’m going to tell you flat out that this is probably the only way to accomplish any sort of data recovery due to the programmer at BLU blocking USB debugging for a boot loader. Mind you, I could probably just QFIL the boot loader and send ya’ll the kernel image, but I want to just fix the problem and not add extra steps.
If anyone can beat me to it, please do as I’m not accustomed to doing such tedious things.
Also note: when you backup data on your phone, it does not backup stored images, music, etc. Just your games and stuff of that sort. Hence, why I’m only doing a partial partition QFIL.

BLU, if you are reading this, I know the only way you can fix this is to use a computer app to load a repaired firmware to the phones. Don’t bother trying to push out an over the air update because the phones are locked. You’ll have to use the original encryption key you used to encrypt user data with which is, in turn, encrypted by the user’s password. There is your screw-up.
Data Encrypted by –> BLU’s password encrypted by –> User’s password/any other secret password for recovery

Yeah, that sounds like the best bet. I don’t know that much about the details of flashing but if there is a way to just clean the bootloader and replace it with an image that isn’t locked out that would hopefully fix the issue. It also looks like they have the whole disk encrypted, so depending on how that is implemented it might still leave all other data useless. Unfortunately, I haven’t had any time to continue trying to solve this broken update. I am planning on using a different image anyway since I no longer have any faith in BLU’s ability to develop software.